“But that practically never happens,” Raymond protested. “I tell you it’s not nearly as bad as it sounds.”
Bert seemed not to hear him. His face was working with horror at his thoughts. “Then you say some people get sick and some of them faint. I know why that is. It’s because those people are imagining they’re up on the gallows with the rope around their necks. They really feel like the man it’s happening to. I’ve done that myself. I imagined I was going to be hung in twenty-four hours. like the most god-awful nightmare in the world. And I’ve been thinking—what’s the use of going up there and horrifying myself? I’d be sick. I know I would. I’d just go through everything the poor devil on the gallows did. Just thinking about it last night, I felt the rope around my neck. Then I went to sleep, and the sheet got over my face, and I dreamed it was that damned black cap.”
“I tell you, you don’t think things like that,” Raymond cried angrily. “If you think things like that you haven’t got any right to go up with me. I tell you it isn’t as terrible as that, when you see it. It’s nothing. You said you wanted to go up, and I got permission for you. What do you want to go talking like this for? There’s no need to talk like you just did. If you don’t want to go, why the hell don’t you just say so and then shut up?”
The look of horror went out of Bert’s eyes. Almost eagerly he seized upon anger. “No need to get mad, Mr. Banks. I was just telling you why I didn’t want to go. If you had any imagination, I wouldn’t have to tell you. If you had any imagination, you’d see for yourself, and you wouldn’t go up to see some poor devil get killed.”
Raymond turned away contemptuously. “You’re just yellow,” he said and strode away to his truck. He drove furiously over the road to his ranch, but when he had arrived and covered the truck, he walked slowly toward his house. His wife was cutting roses.
“What’s the matter with you, Ray? You look sick,” she cried.
Raymond scowled. “I’ve got a headache, that’s all. It’ll go away. You know Bert Munroe that wanted to go up with me next week?”
“Yes.”
“Well, now he don’t want to go.”
“What’s the matter with him?”
“He’s lost his nerve that’s what. He’s scared to see it.”
His wife laughed uneasily. “Well, I don’t know as I’d like to see it myself.”
“You’re a woman, but he’s supposed to be a man.”
The next morning Raymond sat down listlessly to breakfast and ate very little. His wife looked worried. “You’ve still got that headache, Ray. Why don’t you do something for it?”
Raymond ignored her question. “I’ve got to write to Ed, and I don’t know what to say to him.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“Well, I’m afraid I’m getting a cold. I don’t know whether I’ll be in shape to go up there Thursday. It’s a long trip, and cold crossing the bay.”
Mrs. Banks sat in thought. “Why don’t you ask him to come down here sometime? He’s never been here; you’ve been there lots of times.”
Raymond brightened up. “By George! That’s an idea. I’ve been going up to see him for years. I’ll just drop him a note to come and see us.”
“We could give him a barbecue,” Mrs. Banks suggested. Raymond’s face clouded over. “Oh, I don’t think so. A close friend like Ed would rather not have a crowd. But beer—say, you should see how Ed loves his beer. I’ll drop him a note now.” He got out a pen and a little pad of writing paper and an ink bottle. As his pen hesitated over the paper, his face dropped back into a scowl. “Damn that Munroe anyway! I went to a lot of trouble for him. How’d I know he was going to turn yellow on me.”
Ten
PAT HUMBERT’S parents were middle-aged when he was born; they had grown old and stiff and spiteful before he was twenty. All of Pat’s life had been spent in an atmosphere of age, of the aches and illness, of the complaints and self-sufficiency of age. While he was growing up, his parents held his opinions in contempt because he was young. “When you’ve lived as long as we have, you’ll see things different,” they told him. Later, they found his youth hateful because it was painless. Their age, so they implied, was a superior state, a state approaching godhead in dignity and infallibility. Even rheumatism was desirable as a price for the great wisdom of age. Pat was led to believe that no young thing had any virtue. Youth was a clumsy, fumbling preparation for excellent old age. Youth should think of nothing but the duty it owed to age, of the courtesy and veneration due to age. On the other hand, age owed no courtesy whatever to youth.
When Pat was sixteen, the whole work of the farm fell upon him. His father retired to a rocking chair beside the air-tight stove in the sitting room, from which he issued orders, edicts and criticisms.
The Humberts dwelt in an old, rambling farm house of five rooms: a locked parlor, cold and awful as doom, a hot, stuffy sitting room smelling always of pungent salves and patent medicines, two bedrooms and a large kitchen. The old people sat in cushioned rocking chairs and complained bitterly if Pat did not come in from the farm work to replenish the fire in the stove several times a day. Toward the end of their lives, they really hated Pat for being young.
They lived a long time. Pat was thirty when they died within a month of each other. They were unhappy and bitter and discontented with their lives, and yet each one clung tenaciously to the poor spark and only died after a long struggle.
There were two months of horror for Pat. For three weeks he nursed his mother while she lay rigid on the bed, her breath clattering in and out of her lungs. She watched him with stony, accusing eyes as he tried to make her comfortable. When she was dead, her eyes still accused him.
Pat unlocked the terrible parlor; the neighbors sat in rows before the coffin, a kind of audience, while the service went on. From the bedroom came the sound of old Mr. Humbert’s peevish weeping.
The second period of nursing began immediately after the first funeral, and continued for three weeks more. Then the neighbors sat in rows before another coffin. Before the funerals, the parlor had always been locked except during the monthly cleaning. The blinds were drawn down to protect the green carpets from the sun. In the center of the room stood a gilt-legged marble-topped table which bore, on a tapestry of Millet’s Angelus, a huge Bible with a deeply tooled cover. On either side of the Bible sat squat vases holding tight bouquets of everlasting flowers. There were four straight chairs in the parlor, one against each of the four walls—two for the coffin and two for the watchers. Three large pictures in gilt frames hung on the walls, colored, enlarged photographs of each of the old Humberts looking stern and dead, but so taken that their eyes followed an intruder about the room. The third picture showed the corpse of Elaine in its boat on the thin sad river. The shroud hung over the gunwale and dipped into the water. On a corner table stood a tall glass bell in which three stuffed orioles sat on a cherry branch. So cold and sepulchral was this parlor that it had never been entered except by corpses and their attendants. It was indeed a little private mortuary chamber. Pat had seen three aunts and an uncle buried from that parlor.
Pat stood quietly by the graveside while his neighbors shaped up a tent of earth. Already his mother’s grave had sunk a little, leaving a jagged crack all around its mound. The men were patting the new mound now, drawing a straight ridgepole and smoothing the slope of the sides. They were good workmen with the soil; they liked to make a good job with it whether it be furrow or grave mound. After it was perfect, they still walked about patting it lightly here and there. The women had gone back to the buggies and were waiting for their husbands to come. Each man walked up to Pat and shook his hand and murmured some solemn friendly thing to him. The wagons and surreys and buggies were all moving away now, disappearing one by one in the distance. Still Pat stood in the cemetery staring at the two graves. He didn’t know what to do now there was no one to demand anything of him.